IMO this will definitely happen. Now there may be a few dozen drivers out of right at these companies, and I think they can find other driving jobs. Eventually there will be tens of thousands of drivers out of work. We should find meaningful work for them. Of course, we might say that about thousands of industrial workers eliminated by automation and they haven’t really been addressed yet.
Far more Americans have been put out of work b y moving production to other countries than by being automated out of a job. They all want the good old AmericanCompany name like Craftsman,Stanley/Fisher Price Trico etc, but none of them want the American workers who made them rich in the first place.
When I started in trucking in the 1950s,in Buffalo NY, more than 3/4 of our day was spent picking up freight,today most of the day is spent delivering freight from overseas.
No. That’s backwards. It will obviously vary by sector and specific occupation. And both offshoring and automation are disruptive to basic middle/working class folks lives. But automation has taken a larger toll on workers than offshoring. It continues to, and keeps affecting more and more occupations. And “we” (the proverbial “we” as the public) still refuse to deal with it because apparently helping people displaced by large-scale, structural economic dislocations is some manner of “socialism.” (As if anyone who uses that word these days even knows what it means.)
+1
The steel mill I worked in had 35,000 employees in the 1950s and about 10,000 when I started there in 1974. No mills had been shut down and they all worked 24/7. It was all due to automation and that wasn’t the end of it. By 1986 when I left, the continuous caster had started producing slabs. That one change meant that at least 100 workers were no longer needed.
+1
The goal of bringing a lot of manufacturing back to The US is admirable. However, new manufacturing in our nation will be done with a very high degree of automation. Instead of vastly increasing employment, the effect will be minimal.
Corporations will benefit… bigly… workers, not so much.
My viewpoint may be a result of my age and the part of the country I lived in. I remember the bustling sidewaljks of downtown Buffalo in the 40s and 50s and when I started in trucking in 55Buffalo was a major Railroad and manufacturing hub. It was the eastermost point that raw materials could be taken to cheaply by Great Lakes shipping.
Almost everything made in this country had a version of it made in Buffalo.
Today it is an industrial ghost town, with former factories being gentrified into apartments or being torn down for apartments or other uses. The old cobblestone district has been converted into sports arenas,barsand loft apartments.
The opening of the St Lawarance Seaway and Welland canal gave ocean going ships access to the Great Lakes and ended the advantage of our location.
Yes, but try and find someone to work in a cotton mill these days, and all our machinery has gone to foreign countries.
It’s not socialism it’s technology. Been happening since the cave man discovered fire. I don’t want to be a cave man again.
Train the truckers on a new job. I had to learn a new programming language in my 50s. It happens. FYI it made me more productive. And I made more money too.
Learning a new computer language when you’re already in the field is no big deal. My career expanded 50 years of programming languages. Not just a new language, but different language techniques. Structured programming wasn’t around when I started - so I had to learn that. Then the big shift was to Object Oriented programming. Started programming on Main frames, then Mini’s. Shifted my career to low-level work in networks and device drivers, then PC applications and then Web Applications. And lets not mention thins like SQL and Powershell and JavaScript. If you’re in the Tech field for the long hall it’s a continues learning process. If you don’t continue to learn you’ll fall too far behind to ever catch up.
My brother-in-law was a plant manager for Chryco and they had plenty of layoffs for the factory workers. It’s a lot more difficult for many of those workers to start a new career (aka programming) at 50.
You missed the point of my statement. I was poking fun at people who call various kinds of public programs designed to give people a leg up “socialism.” It’s a favorite boogeyman word for some segments of the population.
I remember Hillary Clinton being laughed out of a meeting with out of work coal miners in their 50s and 60s in West Virginia when she was running for president.
She promised to retrain them for new jobs if she got elected.
One of the workers reminded her that she said she was going to bring down "Big Coal’ . He then asked her if she was going to make them all computer programmers and that brought down the house with the absurdity of the idea.
I could no more have been trained as a programmer that them.
The first time I ever sat at a computer was 12 years after I retired. The only computer I have ever used is a mac desktop and I just started carrying a smartphone. An old iphone 6s because that fits in my pocket.
Just yesterday I learned how to scan a QR code. I had asked 3 people how to do it and they all told me that you just hover over it with the camera. Finally I asked my oldest son and he told me that I had to click on a bracket that appears on the screen to be taern to a website but that would never have occurred to me. I asker her, how would anyone think I knew the second step when I did not know the first/ It was we were talking two different languages. She says iy is all intuitive. I see nothing intutive about either a computer or a smart phone and i will never truly be adept at either one.
I’m still not into QR codes. I can and have used them, but I hate them.
But I’m not sure about the Clinton point. The decline of coal employment has nothing whatsoever to do with politics / politicians. There is no end to political theater. “Big coal” has a) never been good for coal miners and b) has been mechanizng workers out of the loop for about a century now. Trying to tie politics to coal employment is like trying to tie weather to your last sneeze.
But since “Big Coal” has mostly gone to “Big Equipment” rather than paid human labor, and since coal has been on decline lately for economic reasons (NOT political ones), opportunities for job retraining is a thing. And an important thing. You might have been past your prime for that or a need for that. But large structural economic shifts are a very real thing. And IMHO it’s ok to develop public programs to help people out with it.
Folks in coal mining regions need a leg up. (And I’m fine for my tax dollars to aid in that). But they’re not on the down-slide because of politicians. And no politician will “save” them by somehow bringing coal back.
I think that is a needlessly-negative view of the abilities of older Americans. At the age of 60 (because of deteriorating workplace conditions), I took early retirement from my lifelong career as an educator. But, because I was too old to just sit around the house, I decided that I needed to re-train for a new career, and I began my 3rd academic degree program (to become a Certified Legal Assistant/Paralegal).
My classmates were all of the typical age for college students, and it was obvious that “the old guy” was an amusement for some of them. Their eye-rolling and amusement began to dissipate when my Torts professor announced in class that “the old guy” was the only person who had ever achieved a perfect score on his all-essay Final Exam (I filled seven “Blue Books” during his two hour exam). He even told the class that he hoped they would be able to do better against “the old guy” in their other courses. Fast-forward to graduation, and “the old guy” was the top-ranked student in the college’s legal courses.
That degree program included courses to upgrade my deficient computer skills. While I achieved only average grades in the computer courses, the bottom line is that “the old guy” was successful in bolstering his computer skills and in getting himself prepared for all of the computer-related work that my new career would entail.
I paid for this new career training for myself, but–IMO–one of the best ways for states or federal government to spend their money would be to retrain/reeducate displaced workers. Enabling people to obtain new–salable–job skills would have a very positive effect on displaced workers–and on the economy of their town/state.
You may choose to disagree, but I believe that retraining of displaced workers is a very important function of government, and I also believe that age should not be a factor when retraining/reeducating people.
Some unnamed politician promised to “bring back coal” in 2016 and again in 2024, I have yet to see a new Stanley Steamer factory being built. The trains are still running diesel-electric or pure electric locomotives.
There’s still a fair amount of coal mining in West Virginia, Virginia, and Western Pennsylvania. I see long trains of coal going past my neighborhood to the Port of Baltimore for export.
Instead. Trump said he’d increase Coal plants and give them all free better healthcare better then the Affordable Care Act. They didn’t laugh at that, but the rest of the country sure did. They’re still waiting.
We have a shortage of drivers. The autonomous trucks will allow those fewer drivers to sleep at home and spend time with their families instead of driving a semi across the country. They will shuttle trucks from a marshaling lot to the docks or making local deliveries where the autonomous semis cannot. There may not be any truckers losing their jobs. There likely won’t be many new jobs created for truckers but there will need to be more educated techs to fix those semis’ computers.
New technology has always displaced workers but the new jobs created were always greater than the loss.
When I was starting college, when that person in a business suit showed up for class, we KNEW they were a “curve breaker” because they scored very well on tests. Mature and Motivated beats Entitled Youth every time!
Well, I wasn’t wearing a business suit, but it was clear that I didn’t really blend-in with the bulk of the students. In my earlier post, I should have mentioned that a few of my classmates were in their 40s & 50s, but I was the oldest one–by far.
Those folks in their 40s & 50s were people who had lost their jobs when Lucent Technologies went belly-up. The State of NJ paid their tuition, so that they could be properly-trained for new career opportunities, and that proved to be a good investment for the state, based on their steady employment, post-graduation.